So your solution involves maintaining the current top teir private schools as is, with all the inequality that entails?
Who is maintaining top tier private schools? They are. Are you suggesting the state dismantles them?
Fuck yes.
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As much as I dislike Harvard, if you think the state should have that much power, just take people’s money instead. Also, the state shouldn’t have that much power.
Okay. Im being a little provocative.
But
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Spend a lot more money on public universities. (With means testing so you have more to spend)
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Remove tax breaks for rich universities.
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Enforced proportion of government supported places at all universities.
To start with and see what happens. But engineering out the gross inequality of the current system has to be a explicit objective.
Anyway. Like i said. Im very happy to concede the American system is a little different. But id like to think we should be more ambitious.
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For anyone who’s interested, I’m going to write about my teaching experiences this year in this thread, primarily the in-person class I’m teaching this semester. They’re different because of COVID, but they don’t really relate to COVID, so I think they’re more appropriate in this low-volume thread than in the COVID thread.
Autumn semester: I taught a small (<10 student) PhD seminar where there’s naturally a lot of interaction. This course was entirely online via zoom. I was in my basement in pajamas (like I am now) and everyone just participated remotely. It worked out great; I think there was very little lost from a typical in-person class.
This semester: I have an undergraduate class that would normally have 45 students (if at capacity), but this year is capped at 26 students. The first two weeks of class were–per university rules–entirely remote. These two weeks didn’t go as well as the PhD seminar, for a couple of reasons. First, almost none of the students had their webcams on, so I had no facial cues to respond to. Second, undergraduate students tend not to be as active/talkative in class, which results in a low-energy environment where I just lecture instead of engaging the students. That sucks.
But now that those two weeks are over, I’m back in the classroom. This was at my option: Faculty had a choice of doing fully remote classes, hybrid classes, or fully in-person classes this semester. (I think the university wanted students to have a range of class formats to choose from, but I never felt any particular pressure to choose one format over another.) I chose hybrid because I enjoy teaching in person and because I thought the university’s safety plans sounded reasonable. I still think that’s right.
Basically:
- Students face mandatory COVID testing once a week, and positive students are physically quarantined in university property.
- I’m not sure if faculty have mandatory testing, but I believe we can get voluntarily tested at the University testing site whenever we want. (This is where I got my test after I traveled to Florida a couple of months ago to take care of my mom.) The saliva test is super fast and simple.
- The tiered classroom I teach in normally holds 45-50 students. My class this semester is 26 students, but only 13 students can attend in person at any given time. Half the class is scheduled for Monday in-class and Wednesday remote; the other half is scheduled for the opposite. So at its most crowded, there will be 13 students in the large classroom.
- As expected, not every student who can attend in person does attend in person. Today was the third in-person day, and there were only 3 people in class. (This is at least partially because of a large snowstorm we had this weekend.) Last week, I think there were 10 and 8 students in person on the two days.
- My biggest concern was not the classroom, which feels very safe to me, as the closest student is about 20-30 feet away from me, and everyone is wearing a mask. Instead, it was traveling to the classroom. In normal times, hallways are a giant mass of humanity, and I was definitely concerned about that. LOL - it’s like a ghost town. I get to the classroom about 20 minutes before class is scheduled to start and there is basically no one in the building anywhere. I don’t know the statistics, but I’m inferring that most classes this semester are online.
This got longer than I expected so I’ll stop here. Happy to answer any questions. I’ll probably talk about classroom technology and quizzes/exams at some point next.
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I’ll add on that when I made the choice about in-person versus remote teaching in the fall, my strong assumption was that students preferred to be in person rather than remote. I feel like that was the message I was seeing from the university, and I was probably also influenced by the proponents for in-person K-12 schooling in my area.
But I’m honestly not sure if that assumption is true. Based on their actions, there are a lot of students who prefer not to be in class - they’re not there physically on their assigned day, but I can see them logged in to the zoom session watching. (This is fine - I don’t mandate or even encourage students to attend in person.) And of the ones that do attend in person, most don’t ask questions or otherwise volunteer in class. So I’m left wondering if maybe I made this choice to teach in person based on a completely bad assumption. (This would be a costly mistake for me - rather than rolling downstairs to the basement, I’ve got a 60-70 round trip commute and have to pay $10 for parking each day!)
The good news is that two students so far have asked if they can attend both days in person, which signals that at least some of them find value in the in person class. I’m allowing it as long as total students don’t exceed the 13 person cap on any given day.
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can you require them to keep a camera on? we can’t and that’s been a source of frustration for some of the faculty.
I’m not sure if I’m allowed to, but I’m not sure there’s a ton of upside to it, other than making life more pleasant for me. If it’s not actually improving learning experiences, then I’m not super motivated to require it. I do require webcams to be on while they’re taking quizzes and exams, though.
The one thing that a colleague did last semester is actually cold call on people, even remotely. I have been reluctant to do that, but it’s more because of my discomfort than because I think it’s a bad idea. (Colleague is almost certainly a better teacher than I am.)
It just occurred to me - I don’t actually need to shave if I’m teaching in person, since I’m wearing a mask the entire time.
Jesus fuck. There was just a systemwide malfunction of the alert system in Cobb County schools, so there were two “red alerts” at every school, indicating that there was an intruder and that the classrooms needed to lockdown.
Fortunately, my kids are at home, but my daughter could see it going on in her virtual class.
I tell my remote students that letting them leave their webcams off would be equivalent to letting them stand outside the closed classroom door shouting answers as-needed. That comparison seems to work.
This is a man who has shaved at some point during the pandemic.
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Wish we could do this. Our rules about no cam requirements were among the few things established in writing early on during the move to online classes. The concerns over privacy were more important than the potential pedagogical impact of not being on the screen. Maybe spider is right though, and it’s not as critical to learning as seems to be (to me anyway)
Oh my, the L-word! Prepare the fainting couches. Yeah, on average they are very low energy like Jeb!, but if you become a fad-pushing active learning pedagogue you can avoid that by pretending it’s not true.
I think the webcam on/off discussion is interesting as it relates to work meetings as well. Some people really really want webcams on in meetings and insist that it helps personalize interactions more and avoid conflict. (Meanwhile it seems like they actually create conflict while they insist on and wait for others to turn their cameras on before starting the meeting.) Other people say that it helps them connect more. (I’ve had a few of my reports tell me this.) Personally, I don’t think it matters and don’t care if people keep them on or off. I just tend to go with the flow and turn mine on if any more than a few people have theirs on. And also turn it on when talking to my reports that prefer it on.
I can’t tell whether you’re defending lectures (I think you are?), but I’ll use this post as an excuse to talk about how fun it can be to teach a really engaged class. One of my favorite classes to teach is financial statement analysis to executive MBA students - people who don’t really have any background in finance or accounting, who don’t know how to read financial statements, but are likely going to be expected to understand them in the future.
I start out with just my basic personal Balance Sheet, where I have them guess what items are likely to show up as Assets and Liabilities on my own Balance Sheet. It’s kind of a fun way for them to get to know a little bit about me (e.g., they find out that I have a couple of boring cars, in contrast to the many German cars parked in our parking lot). But it’s also a good way to introduce semi-complex topics in an understandable way. For example:
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I’ve got a bunch of beer in my basement, some of which could be sold for a decent amount of money. Should that be on the Balance Sheet at its original cost or should I update it to market value? If I keep it at the original cost, it’s going to understate my net worth (and make me seem like a worse credit risk) because it’s going to treat that 2013 bottle of Goose Island Bourbon County Proprietor’s Stout as if it’s worth $15, rather than $200. But if I have the ability to upwardly revise to market value, what’s to keep me from manipulating that value in order to overstate my apparent worth and liquidity?
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I plan on paying my kids’ education costs to the extent I can. Is that a liability that should show up on the Balance Sheet? One argument is no, because it’s not a legal obligation. The other argument is yes, because regardless of the legality, I’m definitely going to pay it; it means that there will be less funds available for satisfying other obligations. This gets at the idea of off-balance sheet liabilities, like when an entity has an unwritten agreement with a subsidiary that they’ll cover all liabilities even if not technically legally obligated to.
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I don’t have student debt, but my wife does. Does that show up on my Balance Sheet? It depends on whether you’re treating us as a consolidated entity or me as a standalone entity. And that carries over to looking at an individual firm that’s part of a larger network.
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Should I list my retirement funds as an asset on my Balance Sheet when I can’t access them without incurring a penalty? What about the taxes I’d owe? This gets at the idea that sometimes, regardless of how good your accounting is, you need to have additional disclosure to lay out the extent to which various assets are restricted. For example, when firms have money held in a foreign subsidiary to avoid US taxation, and where repatriation of that money would generate taxes. (I’m actually not sure how this works under the most recent tax law, though.)
Anyway, that’s a really engaging class where I absolutely think that student learning is much higher because of that engagement. I just haven’t figured out a way to mimic that experience in an undergrad class where we talk about the effect of unguaranteed residual value on lessor accounting, or why the equity component of convertible bonds isn’t actually recognized appropriately.
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I am absolutely defending lectures. It’s mostly, but not entirely, due to this:
Is the answer maybe just that it can’t be done to any meaningful degree in that setting? MBA (and PhD) students are more accomplished and highly-motivated, so there’s plenty of selection there. Those students have enough foundation and confidence to keep a feedback loop going with you. A class of sleepy 20-year-olds doesn’t have the same intellectual mass to keep the echoes bouncing. It’s an anechoic chamber or Newton’s cradle without all of the ball bearings. So I think a lot of the emphasis on flipping undergraduate classrooms is misplaced. For example, the pedagogy visionary in the first department I worked for tried to recreate the MIT TEAL lab at a public state university with non-physics students. It was a disaster with a huge price tag. All of his moves were.
There are situations where lectures are absolutely optimal despite what those people are pushing. If there’s a real problem they’ve identified, it’s that many instructors aren’t good at presenting to (mostly) captive audiences. It’s a valid criticism, but they tend to ignore the people who are amazing at it instead of reverse-engineering it. I have a lot of time, thought, and preparation invested in my approach to speaking, lecturing, and presenting and I never saw anyone in academic pedagogy circles even scratch the surface on what it takes to put it all together.
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Two quick things on getting students to talk:
(1) Do you have a university honors program? If you really want to do a course where you engage with undergraduates, try to get on the list for that. They tend to run like PhD seminars with assigned readings then discussion in class. The students will be motivated and talkative.
(2) My high school science teacher had a PhD in chemistry. His style was almost entirely lecture, but he would stop and ask questions to get us talking and thinking. It was insanely difficult. The grades were based only on several exams (no homework) which came in the form of mimeographed hand-written questions. There were as few as two and at most seven questions on any single exam. Sounds brutal, right? We were absolutely glued to it like a murder mystery. The way he presented abstract concepts was simply fascinating, and I think it was the first time we’d had our minds blown. Dude was the poster child for chalk and talk; when he finished the hour, he was covered in yellow chalk dust.
About once every two weeks or so, we’d do a day without chemistry or physics. Instead, he’d ask us about current events or issues that were relevant to us, and then we’d teensplain things that made absolutely no sense to him. In a way it was like a role reversal from the regular class. That seemed to do two things: (a) let him keep up with youth interests and (b) make students more comfortable talking and participating. So I always tried to weave a similar thing into my classes when possible because students are usually willing to talk about what they know as opposed to, say, the Poisson distribution. You’ll probably learn something interesting as well.
When I teach, I don’t require my students to put their webcam on. A lot of the girls aren’t made up and the guys just woke up like 5 minutes before class if it’s their first class of the day.
The only exception is when giving exams since I have to see who’s actually taking it.